Finding Peace in a World of Worry

Menu

Monthly Archives: March 2018

Because I just ate an entire zucchini stalk in one sitting by myself, I thought I’d reward myself with something sweet. And you get a bonus blog out of it.

#WinnerWinnerZucchiniDinner 😛

Now I had two options left from the latest Asian food haul that showed up last night from the grocery store. A box ofEveryburgerchocolate biscuits and the Crunchy Rice Snack. The burger biscuits I wanted to do last because they are so iconically epic so tonight I bring you *dramatic drumroll*

Crunchy Rice Snacks:

Smell: Like a cinnamon roll.

Look: Puffed rice clusters that resemble corn on the cob. In a word, adorable.

Taste: The closest thing I can compare it to is a cinnamon flavored rice cake. Not overly sweet, but a perfect balance of crunch and flavor. They make you feel good about yourself and your life choices in that you could have chosen to eat a decadent frosting covered donut, but instead, you chose this corn cob shaped grainy thing.

And you don’t have frosting covered donuts in the house anyway.

**We momentarily pause the writing of this blog so that Lulabelle can add “frosting covered donuts” to the grocery list.**

One thing I could see with this snack is that you could break it off from the cob, put it in a bowl and pour milk over it to make a cereal.

And I would totally do this.

We will definitely be repurchasing this snack if we can find it again.

So what happened was I wanted to get a shot of them out of the package so you could see the corn cobby shape. Long story short, I was unable to cram them back inside and they now live in a large ziplock bag. 😛

After our dinner of pizza last night, I was still hungry for a snack, and it was just my luck that Chad had just made a grocery run and had picked up, unprompted, a few Asian snacks for me to try out on my blog. Enjoy!

Milkis Refreshing Milk and Yogurt Flavor Soda

Smell: Very sweet. Took me a few to figure out what the familiar smell was, but it smells EXACTLY like rainbow sherbet, which makes sense because it’s a drink that is supposed to taste like milk and yogurt.

Taste: Papaya with a Milk Of Magnesia finish. Which is unfortunate because I’m not so keen on the taste of MOM as it almost makes me gag. Even thinking about it now is a bit dicey.

But it was a necessary evil when you were a kid and needed a little help to poo.

Look: The liquid is a watery milky color much like MOM (definitely doesn’t help to sway my opinion in a positive direction). The can is pretty cute though and matches my current manicure that I just happened to apply yesterday afternoon.

Roasted Black Rice Snack………….

First off let’s consider the packaging because I’m sure when you studied the packaging, or just gave it a fleeting glance, you probably thought this was a different kind of product that is currently illegal in the state of Indiana in the form that it presents itself to be on the packaging. So just to address the proverbial elephant in the room, I need to put a disclaimer here……

This is NOT pot. 😛

Smell: One whiff and I was back at the county fairs of my youth. Where fried food comprised 90% of the booths.

Taste: A bit bland, but I’m not mad at it. Finishes with a tiny sweet kick.

Kind of reminds me of snacks my Grandma B used to have on hand, specifically these rice puff snacks that I’d ask her to put in my lunch when she visited our house during the school year.

When you eat these, you feel like you are adding more years to your life. (And helping facilitate your next poo. I know I keep talking about it, but honestly, when you reach a certain age and find something that works, you pass along the information as a PSA. 😉 )

Ending thoughts on both of these snacks: I’m still on the fence about the yogurt soda, but we’ll definitely be repurchasing the Roasted Black Rice snack.

“Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity.” 1 Timothy 4:1

To the students who walked out today, I offer some encouragement:

When you hear and see adults criticising you for your choice and say your feelings don’t matter, just remember:

1. Queen Esther successfully petitioned King Xerxes to spare an entire nation from certain death. She is remembered every year during the Jewish celebration of Purim. She was 14. (Esther 1-7)

2. Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego all mustered up the courage to defy a kingdom order and were all thrown into a fiery furnace where, instead of burning, they came out unsinged. The king looked upon them and decreed that their God must be the one true God. They were between the ages of11 and 13. (Daniel 3 NIV)

In our modern times we have:

3. In 1899, newsboys (boys who sold newspapers), went on strike for 2 weeks to protest low wages in New York City. They were successful in increasing their wages.One of the leaders of the protest, Kid Blink, was reported to be between13 and 14 years old. (As a side note, the strike was the inspiration for one of my favorite movies, “Newsies.” 🙂 )

4. Bana Alabed tweeted in real time the events that were happening in her town in Aleppo, Syria during the height of the crisis there in 2016. She has since published a book entitled, “Dear World: A Syrian Girl’s Story of War and Plea for Peace.” She is 8 years old.

5. Founding father James Monroe was18when he co-signed the Declaration of Independence.

So my young marchers, take courage. You are here for a reason and our future is brighter because of you. ❤

Thank you!

PS: Always remember you are never alone and are loved and supported more than you can imagine.

It may be Friday all week on the blog. I just have too much material from life lately to do any other post.

I hope you don’t mind. 😛

So I recently got enough curiosity and courage to attempt liquid eyeliner to up my makeup game. I went to the store and picked up a very reasonably priced liquid eyeliner pen that I thought I could use easier than a traditional ink and brush liner.

I started practicing using the eyeliner at home before I went out in public. My first attempt at putting it on, I spent a good 20 minutes to a half hour making sure things were even on both sides. After several attempts, I was able to get my liner routine down to 10 minutes from start to finish.

Last night I had plans with a friend to go shopping and stimulate the local economy. Because of my schedule and job, I don’t get out of the house as much as I’d like, so when I do, I like to glam it up a bit. So even though it was a random Monday evening, I reached for my new eyeliner and applied it first to my left eye.

Flawless.

I went to apply it to my right eye.

I pressed the felt tip, at an angle as per the instructions, to my eyelid close to my eyelashes…….nothing.

“That’s weird”, I thought. “It worked fine a moment ago.”

I repositioned my hand and tried again……nothing. At this point I’m getting frustrated because here I am, just a girl with a dream of seeing other people in her day other than her cats and her husband and she’s about to walk out the door with lopsided eyelids.

I totally would have done it too. But my plans got pushed back a few minutes and I had time to try again to make an even line on my right eyelid.

N.O.T.H.I.N.G!

GAH!! WHY is this so hard?? The package DOES NOT say the product is only good for 2 weeks.

Even so, I was determined not to just toss the eyeliner-at least until after I used it one last time. And I needed to try to even out my face, so what could I do?

I may have run the liner under a stream of water.

That actually worked really well and I’ll be doing that until either, A: That stops working or B: I get an eye infection because I didn’t know that running your eyeliner underwater can give you one. *It should be noted that I don’t necessarily think that would happen, but knowing me, this is an entirely plausible situation.

So what can you do if you are in the same situation and one eye looks amazing while the other eye refuses to be lined? No worries, just pop on an ungodly bright color of lipstick and nobody will notice your lopsided eyeliner face! 😛

Yesterday Chad and I had a date night and I spent about an hour in the bathroom making sure I was groomed within an inch of my life and putting on my makeup while listening to the RENT soundtrack. I had a song from RENT going through my head and decided to listen to the entire album while I did my makeup in bright shades of purple, blue and a yellow-green that reminded me of that shade of duo-chromatic green with undertones of yellow that was popular in the 90’s when I was in high school.

In case you wondered, this is what I looked like in high school. Apparently brushing your hair was just a suggestion back then. 😀 And yes, I am wearing overalls. I lived in overalls pretty exclusively from 1994-2004ish. At one point, two of my college roommates threatened an intervention so I’d stop wearing them.

I’m getting my next pair today. 😀

Anyway, back to our story…..

Our senior class trip was to Toronto Canada to see the sights and take in a Broadway show. RENT had just found its way to Canada and we were all excited to see it. (OK, I can’t speak for everyone in my class, but I was pretty stoked.)

Right before we left for Canada, it was decided to make the entire class pack their birth certificates because it wasn’t quite known if everyone would be checked at the border or if they’d just want passports and such from our foreign exchange students. I mean, I guess it’s better to be safe than sorry. Now, packing our birth certificates (original copies of course 😉 ) wasn’t in and of itself a big deal. But it was decided by our class sponsors that since we were going off to college and into adulthood just a few months later, that each student in the class would be responsible for their own birth certificate.

Can you see where this is going? Great! I don’t have to finish this blog.

**Lulabelle attempts to exit stage left to hunt for chocolate in the freezer to satisfy her sweet tooth. Meanwhile, the ghost of High School past intervenes to give her a gentle reminder**

Dangit! I guess that wasn’t quite the entire point of the story. Let’s **begrudgingly** continue.

So anyway, our trip went off without a hitch. This particular story picks up on the morning when we left our hotel. I packed my belongings and made it down to the bus to board on time (we were fined a dollar for each minute we were late to places during our trip. This would be one of the last times I was on time for anything the rest of my life. 😀 )

After boarding, I began to have a sinking feeling in my stomach. I mean, it was hardly noticeable at first, but the closer we got to home and out of the country, it grew to such a sickening feeling that I couldn’t ignore it.

I couldn’t remember if I had packed my birth certificate to go back home.

Yep.

This notion was confirmed when I returned home and went through my things and didn’t find it. I knew the hardest part of this was going to be telling my parents. As it was after midnight, I crept to my parent’s bedroom door and knocked. My mom answered and had the look of just getting up from a very deep sleep. I anxiously blurted out, “I think I left my birth certificate in Canada,” and waited for the parental hand of God to come down on me. To my relief, she said, “It’s ok. We’ll talk it out in the morning,” turned around and went back to bed.

I should have known this wasn’t the end of the conversation. But at that moment, I was just satisfied that I hadn’t gotten punished. I went to bed, happy and content that this incident was behind me.

“Don’t you know all the things you are going to need an original birth certificate for??”

“I don’t think you understand how SERIOUS this is!!”

Ah, this was a fun interaction.

Dear parents, when your kid F’s up and needs to be punished, PLEASE take the time to do it immediately so your kid doesn’t get a false sense of security and is blindsided later by the consequences of their actions.

Or let them sweat. But tell them that they will be punished later.

Honestly, my parents didn’t ground me or take away my phone (didn’t have one anyway-HA!). In my parent’s wisdom, they knew I’d be paying for this mistake for YEARS to come.

And I have.

To add insult to injury, most of the things I’ve needed a copy of my original birth certificate (which you can thankfully get for a small processing fee) involve the DMV. A place no ordinary human goes to for a fun time.

This alone is DEFINITELY punishment enough. 😛

It’s amazing how many places you need your birth certificate immediately after you no longer have it. And yes, one thing that my mom made me do the next day is call the hotel and ask if they found one.

They did not.

So if you are a young person going out of the country, make sure you make knowing where your passport and birth certificate is at all times a priority. Worst case scenario, get it tattooed on your hip or something.

DO NOT, however, get it tattooed on your boobs. That would create a whole host of other issues. 😉

I don’t know what the solution would be to never lose another important item in your life, but I hope this story made you smile and hopefully you’ll remember to remember your birth certificate the next time you need it.

Search

About Me

A housewife and full time cat wrangler of 2 (of the domesticated kind, wild cats would increase my anxiety--although that could create good content for the blog--) who tries to find humor in any and all situations while living life with anxiety
For more fun content including original stories, follow me on Steemit.com at https://steemit.com/@lulabelle